As everyone begins to cozy up for the holidays, we figure it’s time for the second edition of tech stories we couldn’t help but share. Make yourself a hot toddy and put your feet up by the fire, or the monitor, or whatever you put your feet next to… and take in some of the articles we’ve been sharing among ourselves over the past month.

Newsstand by flickr member Takashi Toyooka

Google goes mobile first

If Google doesn’t make you prioritize your mobile experience, nothing will. In early November, the search engine generated some conversation when it announced that it was working to make its index mobile first. In other words, Google’s algorithms will start using the mobile version of a site’s content to index and rank pages from that site. This is a big deal. If you still haven’t given your mobile experience the love it deserves, start by following the pointers in this Google Webmaster Central post.

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content…

How Facebook unwittingly became a propaganda machine

There has been a lot of speculation about how Facebook impacted the outcome of the 2016 election. The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller dives in, exploring how a cocktail of self-sorting and Facebook algorithms contributed to the wildfire consumption of propaganda and misinformation.

‘As long as it’s on Facebook and people can see it . . . people start believing it,’ President Obama said right before the election. ‘It creates this dust cloud of nonsense.’

Uber dabbles in A.I.

With the acquisition of Geometric Intelligence, Uber has become the latest Silicon Valley tech company to start dabbling in artificial intelligence. Uber’s newly minted A.I. Labs are tasked with applying artificial intelligence to the development of self-driving vehicles, and using machine learning to solve technological challenges.

Instead of training machines by feeding them enormous amounts of data, what if computers were capable of learning more like humans by extrapolating a system of rules from just a few or even a single example?

What are you reading?

Don’t leave us alone in our little information bubble. We’d love to see the posts and articles that got you thinking and sharing this fall. Post your favourite tech stories in the comments below. Maybe we’ll cover them in January’s link roundup.

It’s not a surprise that intelligently segmented email lists results in more opens, a higher clickthrough rate and better deliverability. Case studies shared by Econsultancy prove this point by citing some pretty impressive metrics, such as a 750% increase in a retailer’s clickthrough rate thanks to segmentation. If you’re just getting started with creating groups within your lists, here’s the why, the how, and some tips on what to segment.

In the second in our interview series, I asked my usual questions to my friend and former colleague Nasser Sahlool, Vice President of Client Strategy at Toronto digital agency DAC Group. A pure play digital strategist, Nasser is dedicated to unpacking the why that drives human behaviour online, en route to developing integrated performance and brand campaigns. Read on for our conversation about everything from the future of digital marketing, to education, empathy and artificial intelligence.

It still amazes me when I see someone using a noreply@ address to send an email, and I have to wonder – what kind of impression do you think it leaves with the recipient? Don’t forget that those who get these messages are customers – or could be. Emails like this are basically telling them you don’t care if they have feedback and are not interested in what they have to say.

As if that wasn’t enough, did you know you are hurting your delivery at the same time?

This is a repost from August, 2010. It is as relevant today as it was then. Please read on.

With the increased number of emails hitting our inbox this season, we figure it’s high time time to share some holiday season and sale newsletters that gave us a happy glow.

Marketers frequently break the mould for sale emails, creating bold messages with simple graphics. Holiday emails, on the other hand, are all over the map. Some are sentimental, while others look like garish holiday catalogues.

Photo by flickr member Hiro – Kokoro☆Photo

Given how crucial holiday emails are to generating seasonal sales, we recommend going with what has historically worked best for your audience. If you’re audience likes tacky, roll with it. If they don’t, turn out something that you know will resonate. Your takeaway: email content doesn’t have to contain the usual holiday themes to push subscribers’ warm and fuzzy gifting buttons.

The bulk of holiday emails we’re seeing are image-oriented, emphasizing big, shiny jpegs over text. We want to remind you that text in emails is also very important; HTML emails that include a few sentences HTML text will improve your deliverability. But popular holiday content is traditionally more about quickly getting your products in front of subscribers to elicit a quick response. As a result, best practices are often sidelined.

We know how it goes. You struggle to scrape together that holiday marketing budget every year. But somehow, it never gets any bigger. Or maybe you’re just starting up and you have no holiday marketing budget at all. We’ve all been there. Many of us are there right now.

Photo: Hack by flickr member Thomas Hawk

One of the myriad things we love about the Internet is how, with a little inspiration and lots of elbow grease, marketers can do a lot with just their brains, a laptop, and an internet connection. Sure, having some advertising and marketing dollars is a beautiful thing. But throwing cash at the problem doesn’t beat creativity… especially if you have no cash to spend in the first place.

Here at Cakemail, we obsessively share links to articles about ideas and innovations that we find exciting. While some links are silly and irrelevant, others are intended to get us thinking about how to do things differently, and better. It’s about time we started sharing some of those links with you, our readers and customers.

Welcome to our first monthly round-up of tech stories we just had to share. Some articles will be hands-on and helpful, while others will look at industry-wide trends and innovations. Enjoy!

There are the obvious ways online retailers prepare, such as creating new offers, developing ad creative and launching Black Friday landing pages.

In and around all the inventory, discounts and promos, have you taken the time to make sure you’re delivering a seamless customer experience? In this post we’re looking at some easy quality assurance checks and upgrades anyone can do to make sure the holiday sales come in without a hitch.

Photo: Shoppers encased in amber by Michael Davis-Burchat

It’s late October. In other words, now is not the time for a website overhaul. Instead, let’s focus on the projects that are within a marketing manager’s scope to carry out successfully in a few hours. These are (mostly) your DIY projects and won’t require intervention from either the coders who take care of your website or even a designer. That said, we recommend you carry out the first two projects on this list right away, just in case you need a more technical hand with anything that arises.

In this first instalment of Digital Marketers Q&A, I sat down with Stephanie Kennan, President of Bang Marketing, a Montreal-based agency specializing on B2B. Stephanie is everywhere in Montreal! She is a public speaker, wrote the book (French) Mon site Web chez le psy, blogs on LesAffaires.com and was Honorary President of the Email Marketing Conference by LesAffaires.com.

Smart, charismatic, results driven. I could not have chosen a better person to start this series of interviews aimed at discovering what marketers think and love.

The more you know and understand about your market and what motivates your audience, the better equipped you are to develop content and campaigns that get results. This goes for all digital projects — email, search, social, content — you name it. A little planning and research goes a long way toward telling you what your potential customers are actually doing online.

Photo by flickr member velacreations

This is what we mean by planning. And yes, planning is a profession and a discipline. It should be an essential step in your campaign or content development process.

Planning looks at the five w’s: who, what, where, when and why. By exploring data that reflects user behaviour before you start developing your campaign, you can learn things such as annual market cycles, what keywords your customers are using, and which products and trends are driving consumer behaviour.

Here are three Google tools that will cost you absolutely nothing in exchange for a wealth of information about your market niche and customers.